The view of a daffodil Peeta's story
by PhoenixJR
Summary: Have you ever wondered what Peeta was up to before the hunger games? Well, I did, and that is why I wrote this story. The story is to be continued.


With an irritated sigh I wiped the light green frosting off my sleeve for the third time. The jelly-like substance did not seem willing to cooperate today. Neither did I. How could I concentrate on making cakes for the rich people of district 12, when it´s the day of the reaping? Who could possibly be working on the day when an innocent child would be taken from their home, to be slaughtered for the amusement of others?

With a quick look around me I saw the well known interior of the worn bakery. The almost entirely black stone oven in the corner catches my eye first. I am not sure if the flames changed the colour, or if it is the eternal coal dust that has taken it in its power. The black powder from the mines settles on everything in the district; the houses, streets and the very minds of people it seems. The hunched backs and the empty eyes that are so quickly lowered proves that something is lacking within these people. Hope. All the years of hard work and starvation have convinced them that the future won't be much better.

Around the room, loads and loads of cupboards are situated. They are filled with grain, eggs and other necessities for the baking. In the middle of the room, where I am sitting, is the large wooden table which is covered in flour most of the time. When I was little, I could sit for hours just watching my father's strong hands kneading together loaf after loaf of bread. I used to love spending time with my father back then. His deep-set eyes behind the bushy eyebrows got so serious when he was baking. It was almost like he thought that staring at the dough would make the whole thing easier.

I can imagine that for someone who didn´t know my father, he could be intimidating. I know that some people in our district think that the tall, tanned baker with the brown hair that insists on falling down in his forehead repeatedly is scary. That is mostly folks from the Seam, the ones who cannot afford to buy bread or pastries. The ones who do, on the other hand, knows that a wide smile is only moments away from replacing that bitter expression. Myself included, of course.

I am awakened from my memories by a deafening "boom" from upstairs, from the condo that my family and I live in when we are not baking or caring for the livestock. (Meaning our three skinny pigs in the backyard that never seem to loose their apetite.) Condo is probably the wrong word though. For me it has always suggested some sort of luxury. It´s more like a tiny one bedroom aparment where we stuffed all of our stuff in until there wasn´t enough empty floor space to roll a die.

With the sound of thunder and a tornado mixed together my older brother Tod comes running down the stairs, his hair tangled and messed up.

"What were you doing up there, wrecking the place?" I ask, my heart still at the same level as my vocal chords since the unexpected noises. Tod jumpes down the last three steps of the stairs, causing the old wooden floor to wail from his weight.

"I", he replies with a wide, boyish smile, "was lifting the bureau." I wrinkle my forehead, but before I have had the chance to answer my brother he dips his pinkie in the green icing and carefully licks it off his fingers. With a satisfied "that is some serious frosting" he is already out the back door, heading for the pig pen.

_"Why on earth would you lift the bureau?" _I yell after him, but he is already to far away to hear me. Judging by the horrible sound he had done more dropping than lifting.

My brother has always been like that. Cheerful, stupid... muscular. Without a trouble in the world, of course. It had never seemed to bother him that every year the people from the Capitol come to collect our blood samples, like some grotesque blood drive. Just to then randomly pick a lamb for slaughter. I was obviously disgusted by the fact that he didn´t seem to mind much. Especially since the thought of the hunger games itself made me nauseous.

I was almost done icing the cake when the back door was opened with a squeaking noise. I didn´t have to turn around in my chair to know who had just entered the room - I could tell from the way the door had been opened. One of the few advantages with having a crappy door to the backyard.

You could tell by the tortured screech from the hinges when it was Tod who came barging into the kitchen. This time, the door was timidly opened and carefully closed again, so I could tell that it was my oldest brother, Maiek, who had decided to honour the rest of the residents of the bakery with his presence this morning. None of us saw much of Maiek these days. Since that spring, three years on the day now, something had been so terribly broken inside of him that nothing we said or did could help him to fully mend.

Things had started on a low scale. He would lock himself in the bathroom for hours, and if we hadn´t seen him go in there was no way of telling that he was in there. He was always so quiet. A few months later he started vanishing from the house. The first time he had been gone for a few days in a row. My father had been sick with anxiety back then. I could see his worried face in my mind, with his already low eyebrows so hardly wrinkled that you couldn´t even see his eyes.

Maiek came back alright, and faced the fury of my parents with a peacefulness in his eyes that we hadn´t seen in a long time. Since then, Maiek had been coming and going as he pleased. It didn´t matter how much my mother yelled at him or how many times my father pleaded with him to not do this to them, he still kept disappearing. Although I don´t have any proof for it, I think he spends his time in the forest, beyond the so called electrified fence. Probably philosophizing about coincidences, bad luck and Meyci. The girl who, against her will, destroyed his entire world.


End file.
